Letters: An overdue pay raise for city workers

As a dedicated 30-plus-year librarian with the city of Los Angeles, I was disturbed by this article's implication that city workers are getting rich with these long-overdue raises.

In fact, city workers have come together repeatedly during the past five years, twice opening up our contract and working in good faith with officials to relinquish $850 million in wages and benefits to assist the city in time of financial crisis.

We helped the city reduce its workforce by 5,000 positions, took unpaid furlough days, deferred cost-of-living increases, froze wages and voted to pay more toward our pension.

With the city's economy finally rebounding, it is wrong to portray this raise as anything more than fair to overworked employees who have sacrificed much over the past five years to continue providing excellent services to the residents of L.A.